In a typical enterprise environment, the amount of data that is maintained and processed is enormous and rapidly increasing. Information technology (IT) departments to have to deal with many millions or even billions of files, in dozens of formats. Moreover, the existing number tends to grow at a significant (e.g., double-digit yearly growth) rate.
IT departments have started to utilize file classification as a solution to managing these billions of files. When a file is classified according to a classification request, its contents may be read, applicable classification rules are processed into classification properties, and the resulting classification properties used by IT administrators to apply policies to files.
These steps, however, especially in the context of classifying huge numbers of files, are time-intensive and resource-intensive. If a file server performed such steps for every classification request of each file, the typical server would not have enough resources to perform its primary task of serving files. As a result, a solution is needed that provides for file classification yet does not overwhelm server resources.